MindShift » Digital Promisehttp://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift
KQED Public Media for Northern CAFri, 31 Jul 2015 20:06:53 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2How Rural Schools Paid for Students’ Home Internet to Transform Learninghttp://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/12/02/how-rural-schools-paid-for-students-home-internet-to-transform-learning/
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/12/02/how-rural-schools-paid-for-students-home-internet-to-transform-learning/#commentsTue, 02 Dec 2014 14:07:57 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=38512Students at Piedmont High School have MacBook Airs that they can take home and use to access information and homework on the Internet. (League of Innovative Schools)

Like many districts serving low-income populations, it was fairly easy for Piedmont City School District officials in Alabama to find funds for devices. District officials wanted to leverage technology to open up opportunities for the 1,240 students in this rural community, so they started sending devices home with kids in grades 4-12 in 2009 through a program they call mPower Piedmont. However, lack of access to the Internet after school and in kids’ homes became a major obstacle to learning with those devices.

At first, teachers tried to work around Internet limitations, letting students download what they’d need for work at home before they left school. Teachers also helped students find places in the community that had free Internet, like restaurants. Downloading content worked for some things, but it didn’t allow students to truly take advantage of digital tools, like interacting with peers, accessing flipped instruction or conducting online research, said Matt Akin, Piedmont’s superintendent, in an edWeb webinar.

“It was really not fair to say this homework requires Internet access, and if you don’t have it, go to McDonald’s,” Akin said. “But it was the only option that we had.”

At first, to compensate for disparities in Internet connections, many local businesses cooperated with the district and allowed students to use the Internet at their establishments. However, it was difficult for students without independent transportation to get themselves around town. Late one night, when Akin was leaving the middle school, he saw students sitting on the steps of the school trying to use its Internet. That’s when he knew they needed to devise another solution.

‘Our goal is for our students to have higher expectations for themselves.’

Akin applied for a Learning on the Go grant, part of the E-rate program that helps subsidize the cost of Internet for schools and libraries. The district used the money to contract with a vendor that partnered with the city to build a wireless network on existing fiber optic cables that weren’t being used. Then, the school district used E-rate funds to lease use of the network. But, as so often happens with pilot programs, E-rate didn’t renew the program the following year, so the district had to shoulder the costs of maintaining the network.

“The advantage is, wherever they open their computers, they’re connecting back to a network that we lease that connects not only to the Internet, but back to our network at school,” Akin said. Students can now access online homework and flipped lessons, collaborate virtually and connect with their teachers. It costs the district about $10,000 per month to lease the network and pay for mobile hot spots given to students who live outside the range of the city network. That’s 3 percent of the district’s budget. It sounds expensive, but Akin says it was the single-biggest factor in transitioning the district toward new ways of teaching and learning.

The district’s commitment to access for all students and their families is part of what earned it a spot in Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools, a network of schools pioneering new ideas and sharing with the larger education community. “Teaching in a digital environment is hard,” Akin said. “The first year, no matter how much professional development we did, we found out quickly that the general way that we adapted as educators is we took what we were doing on paper and put it on the computer.”

But teachers worked hard to move away from traditional tools like PowerPoint and annotated PDFs and toward more creative uses of the new tools at their disposal. “We invested a lot in teachers,” Akin said. “We found that it doesn’t matter if the environment is digital, it’s all about the teachers. The best professional development we do is to try and find times for our teachers to collaborate and work together.” Teachers have common planning times and seven flexible paid professional development days during the summer built into their contract.

NEW DIGITAL LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

The district’s total commitment to this experiment is paying off. Not only are teachers using a variety of tools to change how they approach instruction, but online learning has also expanded the course offerings. As a small rural district, Piedmont used to offer only Spanish as a foreign language. Now it can offer five languages, including Chinese. Access to the Internet has also pushed the district toward a competency-based model, where students can move at their own pace through course work, sometimes taking two courses in a year, allowing them to pick up an elective or take AP courses for college credit.

Blending online courses with what can be offered in person has also given students who have fallen behind a real chance at catching up and graduating. “What traditionally happens is a kid gets behind and they can only take a certain number of credits in a year, so they never really have the opportunity to catch up,” Akin said. The scheduling just doesn’t work out.

Akin is excited that Piedmont High School is now offering eight AP courses, up from two, and has far more interesting electives like guitar, robotics and computer science (which counts for math credit) than it ever had before. The district has also incentivized summer learning to fight the learning loss many students experience during summer months. Kids can keep and use their school-issued devices through the summer if they agree to take at least one online course. Now 40 percent of middle-schoolers are taking credits toward high school during the summer.

“Our goal is to keep students engaged, but obviously the more credits they can earn in the summer the more opportunity they have to earn advanced credit before they graduate,” Akin said.

Piedmont’s middle school has always had high test scores, but the new digital focus has opened up opportunities to make the entire school competency-based. Students have small group instruction time and then continue that work through online programs that re-emphasize what was taught. The schedule is flexible, so if students are ahead in science but behind in English, their schedules can temporarily be rearranged so they have more time to focus on challenging areas.

“When you allow middle-school students to set their own pace they don’t always choose a fast pace,” Akin said. “So it’s personalized to a certain extent, but we also spend time helping them set goals.” Students meet in teams of 20, in which teachers help them set academic, personal and team goals.

“Our goal is for our students to have higher expectations for themselves,” Akin said. “A lot of our kids’ parents didn’t go to college and some didn’t graduate from high school. So it’s really about setting high expectations for kids and getting them to set high expectations for themselves.”

The effort to re-energize the district through technology seems to be working. For the past two years, 100 percent of Piedmont seniors were accepted to college. The district is working now to track those kids and see how they fared when they got there. Test scores have also gone up, although Akin said that was never the focus of mPower Piedmont.

Akin hopes that if he and his colleagues can transform the school district, more opportunities will open up in Piedmont, an otherwise struggling town. He’s not naive about the fact that many kids go off to college and never come back, but he’s hopeful that in an information economy where most work happens online, there will be good jobs that keep his graduates in the community, too.

]]>http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/12/02/how-rural-schools-paid-for-students-home-internet-to-transform-learning/feed/3PiedmontStudents at Piedmont High School have Macbook Airs that they can take home and use to access information and homework on the internet. (League of Innovative Schools)What Are the Most Powerful Uses of Tech for Learning?http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/08/06/what-are-the-most-powerful-uses-of-tech-for-learning/
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/08/06/what-are-the-most-powerful-uses-of-tech-for-learning/#commentsWed, 06 Aug 2014 15:25:52 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=36953Student produce a web show with tablets (Brad Flickinger/Flickr)

When we talk about the digital divide in education, the discussions revolve mainly around two factors: lack of access to the internet and lack of knowing how to use that access in powerful ways that can fuel learning beyond consuming content.

There are a lot of powerful tools for change available to educators and plenty of creative, inspired educators working hard to put available technology to work in classrooms. A lack of excellence is not the problem in education; access to technology and guidance for participating in the digital space in powerful ways are much bigger challenges.

That is the message Karen Cator, president and CEO of Digital Promise and former head of the Office of Technology at the US Department of Education, is spreading around the country. “When we think about students who do not have access to these kinds of powered-up learning environments, that’s a problem,” Cator said at a presentation sponsored by SVForum, a non-profit that organizes ed-tech events. From Cator’s perspective, the digital learning gap can be broken down into three parts: access, participation and powerful use.

ACCESS AND PARTICIPATION

“Anybody growing up today without access to the internet and to this learning opportunity, I kind of equate it to growing up 40 years ago without a library,” Cator said. “It’s as if you only had the minds of the people around you to learn from.” Digital Promise is working to change that by providing more internet at libraries and community centers, making sure there’s wifi in schools and workplaces and working towards a goal of 24 hour access to both devices and broadband for everyone.

“The problem with education in America is not a lack of excellence. It’s a lack of equity.”

In schools, Cator asks, does access to technology offer students more voice, for example, or allow them chances to become content creators, not just consumers? And is technology use in classrooms giving students experience on the professional tools they’ll need for work outside of school?

“We need to help kids engage in deeper learning experiences,” Cator said. “We need to move from answering questions and these light uses to a deeper way of using technology.” In her travels throughout the country, Cator sees powerful technology use in classrooms regularly. As teachers to continue to connect around professional development online, they can learn and share these ideas with one another.

“The most powerful uses are where people are producing,” Cator said. “They’re answering questions that they are intimately involved with.” She gave an example of one social studies assignment to create a narrative for the Mississippi river. Students started at the headwaters in Bemidji, Minnesota and told stories of the people and places all the way down the river’s banks to the Gulf of Mexico. They used publishing tools to create multimedia presentations: “It’s something you couldn’t do very well without technology,” Cator said.

Another great example might be to dig into a thorny question like human water use and examine why it’s important to our lives (especially in states suffering from drought). Students could then work on ways to improve the school’s water use, for example. This type of project could be done at any grade level. “There are so many questions associated with water use and then when they move into solutions they might do a campaign to conserve water,” Cator said. The learning would be relevant to their lives as students at the school, and technology facilitates the project, rather than being the central element.

Karen Cator, Digital Promise

Students can perform, compose and record themselves easily with technology, turning their work into digital products that can live on the internet long after students have moved out of the class. And students are now able to connect globally in ways they’ve rarely been able to do before. Teachers can help students visualize complicated concepts with digital models, and students can learn to code or make robots — projects that might have seemed fantastical when their parents were in school. The internet has made access to data and information about the world is unprecedented, letting teachers challenge students to deeply engage with the world around them.

Most often these powerful uses aren’t coming from a textbook or even a digital platform that tracks analytics, although that could be a powerful way for teachers to use technology, too. “I think it does come from the hearts and minds of teachers, especially when teachers collaborate with one another,” Cator said.

To that end, Digital Promise is pushing a new initiative called “micro-credentialing” to give teachers something to show for the many hours of learning put in around topics of interest that often don’t qualify for district sanctioned professional development. A micro-credential could be for skills like effective team building and would be displayed digitally. The micro-credential would have metadata showing who submitted it, how that person earned the badge and the artifacts that demonstrate learning.

Slowly, this effort could help legitimize the work teachers are doing voluntarily to become more effective, energized teachers. And, it brings professional development more in line with the kind of demonstrated mastery that educators expect from their students.

It’s been roughly two months since the launch of the Department of Education’s Digital Promise, and though it’s still very early in the process, a few pointed goals are emerging.

The main premise behind Digital Promise is to serve as a national center for research to spur innovation that will improve learning through technology, said Karen Cator, Department of Education’s Director of Technology.

At this point, the center has three goals:

1. To bring smart ideas based on sound research to those who can bring it to life. More specifically giving entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators who create new learning products a central place to access the vast amount of research that’s already been conducted about how we learn and ways to improve learning.

2. To offer challenges and prizes as an incentive to those who can find ways to vastly improve opportunities to learn.

3. To create an organization where schools and leaders can work together on problems with using technology to improve learning. This group is called the League of Innovative Schools, and at this very early stage, it’s a loosely knit collaboration of people who’ve expressed interest in becoming involved.

Within this group, there are three specific goals.

Making sure that schools and districts are informed and supportive of innovation when investing in new technologies — it’s what Cator refers to as “smart demand.”

Gathering evidence and learning more about what’s already happening in schools and districts with respect to using technology. Harvard professor and Macarthur Fellow Roland Fryer is heading up the effort of figuring out how to gather new and different kinds of evidence, Cator said.

Finding ways to learn from each other through collaboration.

For the most part, this is being headed up by Mark Edwards, superintendent of Moorseville Graded School District in North Carolina. Edwards is organizing the first meeting for the League of Innovative Schools on Nov. 28-29, with superintendents from around the country, as well as education consultants and service providers. (See more about Edwards’ views on learning technologies in this PBS Newshour video.)

At the moment, the Digital Promise Web site is very much a work in progress — a repository of comments and input from educators and school officials. Under the Grand Challenges tab, the site asks: What challenges in teaching and learning can technology help us solve? Comments include things like quality professional development for all, how to use video games for learning, how to best support innovators, how to implement flipped teaching in class, and using technology for performance assessment.

Under the League tab, the site asks: “How are you using technology to advance teaching and learning in innovative ways?” People have offered up things like offline and online mobile learning, software that tests and trains reading, and online assessments. Some of the ideas here seem to be written by those who have created educational products, but there’s also feedback from those who want to share their own experience and ideas.

Microsoft will take over the DOE’s TEACH campaign, the online advocacy and recruitment program, which includes the Teach.gov site. As Edweek’s Ian Quillen points out, Microsoft has been involved with the Federal Communications Commission’s “Connect to Compete” program to bring broadband to low-income communities, “as well as launching programs to offer discounted hardware and software to educators and digital literacy training to the public.”

By Sara Nolan

A few weeks ago, the Department of Education introduced its Digital Promise, an initiative to invest in “breakthrough technologies” aimed at transforming the way teachers teach and students learn. Though the message from the top about the importance of leveraging technology seems to be clear, it’s a different story on a local level.

A recent SIIA study indicates a decline in what had been steady progress toward schools and universities building technology and e-learning into their frameworks. Karen Billings, vice president for Education for the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), links this change in part to the economic climate. She notes that it’s not just budget cuts, but also the emotional impact of those cuts — and of prolonged economic hardship in general — that’s affecting how schools buy and integrate technology.

“I liken it to the situation that many companies are finding themselves in,” she says. “Even if they find themselves with some money in the bank, they’re waiting longer before making any decisions about what to do with it. They are too nervous about the future.” Particularly when it comes to bringing in new technology, she says, schools are taking a longer time to evaluate the products and their potential impact and long-term viability because they think “they can’t afford to make the wrong decision.”

In this highly charged context, however, sometimes even the right decision can seem like the wrong one. “There is definitely a problem in communication of those programs,” Billings says. She’s referring to the flack that schools face when community concerns – and media headlines – focus on issues like budget cuts, layoffs, and overcrowding. “Computers in the classroom might be right for one school in a district while at the same time they’re needing to close another school because it’s under-performing or under-enrolled. But once it hits the papers, it’s ‘They’re closing schools and adding computers.’”

As the PTO co-president from tech-rich, budget-embattled Kyrene recently put it in the New York Times article, “You don’t go buy a new outfit when you don’t have enough dinner to eat.” This is recession psychology, and it has a powerful hold on the way we will fund technology in education going forward.

These aspects of recession psychology at work speak to the current state of our “animal spirits” – the human emotions and outlooks that drive economic action. In the book Animal Spirits:How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, authors George Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller address “the sense of trust we have in each other, our sense of fairness in economic dealings, and our sense of the extent of corruption and bad faith.” What those animal spirits seem to need now — if they are to be boosted in this or any other area of the economy — are equal parts hope and hard facts.

In Billings’ analysis, this means that educational technology companies need to be prepared to speak to current and potential users in terms of long-term value for their investment – especially in terms of instructional and administrative efficiencies. “Some schools might choose to switch to a virtual field trip, for example” she says. “They save money on gas, buses. But that needs a lot of bandwidth, so that’s where the investment is.”

Take, for example, the cost of iPads. Last year, Presidio Middle School in San Francisco piloted an algebra class using the iPad, funded by the publisher of the algebra curriculum, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Pam Clisham, the principal, knows well that the devices are costly.

“They’re expensive, but so are textbooks,” she says. “If you had one iPad and all of your textbooks were on your iPad, it would be the same cost. Right now textbooks are running $50 or $60 dollars a piece, plus supplementary materials.” Once you add the cost of each textbook per student per year, the investment in the devices are more than justified.

But it’s more than just about buying the devices. It’s about the mindset around change. When it comes to deciding on priorities, former Governor Bob Wise, president of the Alliance of Excellent Education, said recently: “By the time you get to a consensus, that technology has leapfrogged over you. What you have to do is to provide flexibility that allows systems to move. It’s recognizing that technology is like water, it finds its levels, it moves.”